Book Launch: The Iron Garden Sutra by A.D. Sui

Sometimes, the most delightful things arise out of happenstance. Earlier this morning, Mr. BooksandTea and I had already decided visit a few of our favourite haunts today, like Bakka Phoenix and Little Ghost Books. But then our friend, E.L. Chen, asked us if we were going to be at the book launch happening at Bakka in the afternoon — for The Iron Garden Sutra by A.D. Sui. We had never heard of this book before, but as soon as Mr. BooksandTea read the marketing copy for it, he was sold:

Vessel Iris has devoted himself to the Starlit Order, performing funeral rites for the dead across the galaxy, guiding souls back into the Infinite Light. Despite the meaning he finds in his work and the comfort of AI companionship, his relationships with the living leave him longing for deeper connection.

The spaceship Counsel of Nicaea has been lost for more than a thousand years, its passengers reduced to dust and bone. A relic of Earth’s dying past, its sudden appearance has attracted a team of academics eager to investigate its archeological history. And Iris has been assigned to bring peace to the crew’s long departed souls.

Carpeted in moss and intertwined with vines, Nicaea is more forest than ship….But the plant life isn’t the only sentience to have survived in the past millennia. Something onboard is stalking the explorers one by one. And Iris with his AI enhancement may be their only hope for survival.

The store was standing room only as Sui detailed the genesis behind The Iron Garden Sutra. Sonia Uraldo, host of the Murmurstation podcast for Augur Magazine recorded the entire interview for a future episode, so you’ll get to hear the full discussion eventually. In the meantime, here’s a rapid-fire summary of my notes regarding the concepts that Sui explored while writing:

• Setting up a simple terrarium with moss is so difficult that setting up a generation ship is the ultimate example of hubris. Our view of space travel is too optimistic; we don’t have the slightest clue what it would take to make a self-sustaining ecosystem last hundreds of years.
• Fungi are strange and awesome, and you should watch the Netflix documentary Fantastic Fungi.
• “Who do you become when the situation is completely hopeless?”
• If you want to understand all the ways in which organic matter can break down, corpse farms are where it’s at.
• Watching a dead rat decompose over time at the side of a hiking trail is a surprisingly moving form of meditation.
• You don’t realize how precious privacy is — and how expensive it would be to ensure on a space station — until you’ve lived through lockdown.

The Iron Garden Sutra promises to be a deep, moving look at the impermanence of life, all wrapped up with a locked-room mystery element. It’s going on the TBR pile.